One of the many suborganizations participating in the march is the Pussyhat Project, a movement with a two-pronged mission to “provide the people of the Women’s March on Washington D.C. a means to make a unique collective visual statement which will help activists be better heard” and “provide people who cannot physically be on the National Mall a way to represent themselves and support women’s rights.” The idea is that pink, cat-eared hats worn by a critical mass of march attendees stand to reclaim the word “pussy” from our president-elect and his crotch-grabbing tiny hands. Knitters who can’t attend are knitting hats based on a pattern provided by the Project and sending them to be handed out to marchers (or, in some cases, selling them for a fairly high price). Judging from reports of a pink yarn shortage, that critical mass will be representing.

Not to rain golden showers down on the pussy parade, but I’m not sure that pink, cat-eared hats are a great symbol for the largest women’s march in years. The infantilizing kitten imagery combined with a stereotypically feminine color feels too safe and too reductive to be an answer to the complex issues facing women today. For example, while the March claims intersectionality as central to its platform, and the Pussyhat Project claims to be speaking for both cis- and transgender individuals, the latter’s conception of what it means to be a woman is remarkably narrow. According to the website:

“Pink is considered a very female color representing caring, compassion, and love—all qualities that have been derided as weak but are actually STRONG. Wearing pink together is a powerful statement that we are unapologetically feminine and we unapologetically stand for women’s rights.”

The pussycat, obviously, is a metaphor often used for female genitalia, but one far less evocative than, say, Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers, with their depth and variety of colors. It is a metaphor particularly unsuited to responding to sexual assault. Grabbing my pussy is not an assault on my femininity—which implies that I am soft, delicate, and in need of protection, and that if I’m not explicitly feminine, it’s okay to grab my vagina—but an assault on my humanity, on my inherent right not to be grabbed regardless of my biological characteristics.

Furthermore, the Pussyhat Project is engaging in a form of gender essentialism, which asserts that the gendered characteristics of femininity are directly linked to the biological characteristics of femaleness and, specifically, the presence of a vagina. This binary is one that feminists have fought against for years, arguing instead that femininity is a social construction assigned to femaleness and that females can be feminine or masculine or any combination of the two, as can males.

This kind of essentialism reduces women to their biology and goes hand in hand with the notion that women are somehow naturally “caring, compassionate, and loving.” In reverse, this implies that women who are not caring, compassionate, and loving are flawed and possibility not women at all. At the same time, it implies that the absence of a vagina at birth makes it unnatural to be caring, compassionate, and loving. Yet many men and transpeople are in fact naturally those kinds of people.

This kind of gender essentialism has been used for centuries to enforce gender conformity. Women were denied the vote based on the idea that we were too soft and too unreasonable to use it wisely. Women’s supposedly inherent compassionate nature kept us confined to the home, tasked with raising moral citizens rather than acting as citizens ourselves. Once allowed to work, we have been limited to service areas and judged as incapable of the “hard” work of business, academia, and building.

Gender essentialism, a belief used to oppress throughout most of human civilization, can’t suddenly be used to support intersectionality, a concept which posits that people are defined not solely by their biology but also by their class, their culture, their race, their ethnicity, their religion, and their own unique, personal characteristics. Though the WMW website uses an Audre Lorde quote—“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences”—the Pussyhat Project proposes that because we are women, we are all the same, and it reinforces this view by attempting to make us all look the same. Unfortunately, women’s movements that have claimed that we are all the same because we are all women have not, historically, turned out to represent all women.

Based on early Facebook posts about the event, my original fear for the WMW was that it would be more a celebration of femaleness than an act of resistance against sexism, Trump’s sexism in particular. Months later, the organizers have somewhat assuaged my fears by releasing a four-page guiding vision that connects the march’s feminism to economic and racial issues, inequities in policing and criminal justice, reproductive freedom, better workplace protections, unions, voting rights, immigration, and environmentalism. (A note: The platform, which originally called for solidarity with sex workers, has changed its wording to call for support for “those exploited for sex and labor.”) The Pussyhat Project, on the other hand, has one goal—for all marchers to subscribe to the stereotype of women as feminine. This is in direct contradiction to the guiding principle of the march, which articulates the need for freedom from “gender norms, expectations, and stereotypes.” Ideally, the variety of bodies, signs, and coalitions present at the march will reflect the emphasis on diversity that the organizers have put forward. Let’s hope those things speak as loudly as pink hats.

My takeaway from three panels was big and simple: the female experience is the human experience, people just aren’t trained to think that way. Jeanine Schaefer, editor of the new all-female X-Men series, said on the Gender in Comics panel that when the idea first came up to do an all-female X-Men series, “There was a lot of, ‘What if they all get their periods at the same time? I wouldn’t want to be a dude when that happens!'” Marvel went forward with the comic, but, “Online, people kept asking, ‘Why can’t you just identify with dudes?’ And I just wanted to be like, ‘Guys! I’ve been doing that my whole life because there is no one else to identify with!'”

Dire predictions aside, X-Men #1 sold more than any other comic in the month in which it was released.

Despite the overall optimism that readers can connect with female characters, queer characters, and characters of color, panel moderator Christina Blanch noted that in the popular imagination, comics is still a man’s world. A Ball State University professor who also teaches a popular online gender-through-comics class, Blanch related the results of a class experiment in which she had students read comics in public and gauge the reaction. Every single one of the women was questioned by passersby about why she was reading a comic. On the other hand, only one male student was questioned, and he was reading Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The panelists agreed that the development that has most changed the landscape for women in comics is the ability to buy them online—without going to the kinds of stores that Blanch referred to as “rapey.” At the same time, creators urged the audience to pre-order comics they like from their neighborhood stores because that’s the only way the stores will ever carry them. Comics writer Grace Randolph says she often hears from fans that Supurbia, her multi-racial comic populated with both male and female heroes, is not available in stores. Dafna Pleban, an editor at Boom!, which publishes Supurbia, bemoaned the effect that a lack of diversity has had on her favorite genre:

“Women love superheroes. We love characters who are empowered both physically and as people who make decisions in their lives. This perception that women read different genres is why the superhero genre is where it is now—because it has limited voices. In the end, being inclusive and being seen by other people as human, that’s just good writing. If you want to tell the story you have to do it.”

Though the Witty Women of Steampunk panel contained very few actual references to the gender of the panelists or of their characters, Anina Bennett, author of Boilerplate, summed up why steampunk—a subgenre of speculative fiction set in a psuedo-historical, steam-powered era—provides such fertile ground for female artists who want to reclaim an historical image of womanhood:

People make a categorical distinction in their minds between fiction and history, and they think that history is pure fact, utterly objective, no information left out. But history is written by winners, we all know that. So part of what we’re trying to do is tweak those lines a little bit and get them to think about when they’re reading other things that are supposedly non-fiction, there’s always a point of view.

I tracked down panelist Kaja Foglio, author of steampunk comic Girl Genius, on the convention floor to find out what it is about steampunk that makes it a good fit for women writers and female characters.

“I think we see the age of steam as this time of adventure and travel and that’s something that people enjoy. I mean everybody does. And there really were women doing exciting things back then. They just didn’t get as much press,” said Foglio. “So now you have female creators saying, ‘Cool, we can tell her story.’ But it’s not just because I’m a woman—I think it’s more of human thing really, to like exotic locations and interesting machines.”

This is a dark summer for geek girls. Though superhero and comic book-based films are all the rage these days, it’s male crime-fighters who get all the attention: there are no films starring female superheroes on the horizon.

Take the whip-smart spy Black Widow, for example. The Avengers member will co-star in Captain America: The Winter Soldier in 2014, but the buzz around a film in which she is the titular character all but died out in 2012. Likewise, every attempt to make a movie focused on Wonder Woman has failed to overcome the Hollywood “prevailing wisdom” that women action heroes don’t sell.

Frankly, that argument is hollow.The Hunger Games, starring deadly archer Katniss Everdeen, took in $687 million at the box office. In comic book world, the women in the X-Men have become so popular that they now have their own comic. Joss Whedon, outspoken critic of the lack of women heroes in film, is adding a woman to Avengers 2 with the Scarlet Witch. Yet the total number of women on screen is shrinking.

So why are there so few female superhero films? Hollywood’s extreme beauty standards mean that studios only want to make films starring a particular kind of beautiful woman, super heroines included.

For example: Would a She-Hulk movie ever get off the ground? This isn’t a wild idea—She-Hulk has been a part of the Avengers (she’s Dr. Bruce Banner/The Hulk’s cousin) and the Fantastic Four, and both franchises have new movies coming out in 2015. She has been a member of S.H.E.I.L.D—about which Whedon is currently making a TV show. She even once had an affair with an X-Man called the Juggernaut. She-Hulk is very much a part of the mythological universe that makes up these currently popular stories.

But would major studios ever make a She-Hulk film? She’s green. She’s angry. And she’s big. Having only been exposed to the Hulk’s blood and not to actual gamma radiation, she is less monstrous than he and has more control over her powers, but she is arguably the most muscular woman in comics at 6’7″ and 600 pounds. Shapely, flexible Black Widow is clearly an easier sales pitch.

A She-Hulk movie may never be more than a pipe dream, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask that some of the women in genre films weigh in at something more than 120 pounds. Instead we appear to be moving backwards. Despite the popularity among both men and women of tough-girl Katie Sackoff in Battlestar Galactica, NBC’s The Bionic Woman, in which she co-starred, was quickly canceled. Smallville, which was on for ten years, gave us a Lois Lane with a third-degree black belt, and that character lives on in the Smallville comic. And yet, producer Deborah Snyder has said that Amy Adams’ petite Lois Lane in Man of Steel, though “a really strong female character, and very proactive” functions primarily to save Clark “emotionally.”

A Justice League movie is in the works for 2015, and as of now, Wonder Woman is slated to be a part of it. But it’s going to take more than vocal comic book fans to get DC Entertainment to cast a woman who could believably be an Amazon. According to the 2004 DC Comics Reference Guide, Diana Prince/Wonder Woman was 6′ tall and weighed 165 pounds. However, according to the current DC Database, she’s 6′ and 130 pounds. At this rate, in a few years she won’t be able to stand up. But she will be more likely to get her own movie.

Man of Steel does feature a female supervillian: Faora of Krypton, a version of whom appeared in Superman and Superman II. Being Kryptonian, the earth’s sun gives her the same powers it gives Superman. Given that and the casting of Antje Traue, who ably defeated aliens and humans alike in Pandorum, I’m guessing Faora will be capable of wreaking quite a bit of havoc. But it’s not her movie, and it’s a little hard to really celebrate a character whose primary motivation is a hatred of men. Nor is it a coincidence that the most badass woman on screen this summer is also a bad guy.

It speaks volumes that Hollywood is willing to bank on superheroes who still fit into very, very narrow and petite beauty norms. Watching a grown woman fight requires us to confront our underlying suspicion that some women will never conform.

The stunning and talented women in this summer’s blockbusters are not the problem. The problem is a culture that can only stand to see women heroes who weigh no more than the average 16-year-old girl. The truth is that women of all sizes can be heroes. They already exist as such in comic books for now. Let’s get some up on the silver screen.